The present invention relates to biometrics in general and, in particular, to biometrics based on multispectral skin texture.
Fingerprint-based biometric sensors are used across a broad range of applications, from law enforcement and civil identification to commercial access control. They are even used in some consumer devices such as laptops and cellular telephones. In at least some of these applications, there is a general need in the art to reduce the overall size of the sensor in order to reduce the area of the device that the sensor occupies, as well as to reduce the overall cost of the sensor.
Most fingerprint sensors work by imaging a fingerprint and comparing the image to one or more stored images in a database. As such, when a large area of the fingerprint is imaged, more data may be compared and more discriminating results may be obtained. Conversely, the performance of these types of fingerprint sensors may degrade as their sizes decrease.
One way to accommodate this concern may be to produce long, narrow fingerprint sensors that simulate a larger-area sensor by combining a series of narrow images collected while the user swipes a finger across the sensor surface. Another, similar way to accommodate this concern may be to piece together a set of smaller images of a fingerprint to collectively form a larger fingerprint image (called “mosaiking”). Such configurations may reduce the sensor size, but they may also place additional burdens on the user (e.g., requiring the user to learn how to swipe a fingerprint or requiring precise locating of the finger on the sensor) and may limit the applications in which such a sensor may be employed.
It may be desirable, therefore, to provide a reduced-size biometric sensor that may be highly usable and employed in a wide variety of applications without a significant degradation in functionality or usability.